Some people say, "My life flashed before my eyes," when they almost died. Is this real? In 2022, doctors were checking the brain waves of an 87-year-old man. Suddenly, his heart stopped, and he died.

His brain showed fast waves. These waves are like the ones we have when we remember things. But this was only one man, and we cannot ask him what he saw.

People who have nearly died sometimes say their whole life flashed before their eyes. In 2022, scientists found brain data that might be connected to this. An 87-year-old man was having his brain waves recorded for a test when his heart suddenly stopped.

In the 30 seconds or so around that moment, fast brain waves called gamma waves increased. According to the research team, this pattern looked similar to brain activity during remembering and dreaming. The news spread around the world.

However, there were serious limits. The data came from just one person, his brain was already injured, and he was taking medicine for seizures. Most importantly, nobody can ever know what he actually experienced.

The phrase "my life flashed before my eyes" describes an experience reported across cultures, and in the 1970s psychiatrists collected accounts of such "panoramic memory" from people who had faced death. Such testimony, however, reveals nothing about what happens inside the brain. In 2022, researchers analyzed a rare recording from an 87-year-old man whose brain activity was being monitored for epilepsy when he suffered a cardiac arrest.

In the roughly 30 seconds before and after his heart stopped, gamma oscillations increased and became more strongly coupled with other rhythms, a pattern the team compared to memory retrieval and dreaming. The authors cautiously suggested a possible link to a kind of life review. The limitations, though, are considerable. It was a single case; the patient had bleeding in the brain and seizures and was receiving anti-seizure drugs; and his subjective experience can never be verified.

Related findings exist: a 2013 study observed a surge of gamma activity in rats after cardiac arrest, and a 2023 study saw similar surges in two of four dying patients. Even so, such activity may simply be a final reaction of an oxygen-starved brain rather than evidence of conscious recollection.